


Slantwise Through the Sky

by ephemeralblossom



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Pining, Presumed Dead, ToT: Chocolate Box, ToT: Extra Treat, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-26 00:12:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12544436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ephemeralblossom/pseuds/ephemeralblossom
Summary: “You were dead,” Jaime says, the untruth the only words he can muster.





	Slantwise Through the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jiokra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jiokra/gifts).



Brienne is alive.

Alive, and Jaime cannot breathe – for she has been dead these five months gone. _Slit from throat to navel_ , Cersei had said when she told him, a touch of the satisfied ghoul in her voice. Brienne was an enemy, and Cersei had always been coldly implacable when her hate was roused; but Jaime had seen the flash of her eyes and the pleasure in the set of her mouth, and had suspected that her satisfaction was not only due to the death of an enemy. 

He has grieved Brienne in his own time, in his own way. There has been little time or space for grief in this bitter war of attrition, as brother slaughters brother. Tyrion slew their father, Stannis slew his daughter, Olenna of Tyrell slew Cersei’s son and Cersei slew Olenna’s grandchildren. Jaime, his hand red with the blood of some mother’s child, some child’s father, has become numb to the horrors; yet when he thinks of Brienne, lying sightless in the muck of some barren field, her body mutilated, he cannot sleep. He walks his sentry lines in the moonlight, turning his face from the memories.

And now she stands before him, alive.

“You were dead,” he says, the untruth the only words he can muster.

She does not smile – her face is tired, her lack of sleep as clear as his. Still there is a softening around her eyes, and something under Jaime’s ribs twists. “Yes,” she says. “I died, and my death gave me the element of surprise.”

He clears his throat. It feels raw. “I was told… they said you…”

“I told them to make the story bloody,” she says, reading his face. She is no great diplomat, to delicately pry secrets from men’s bones, but he feels as if he must be a clear trail to her, easy to track, here in these first moments of surprise. “I knew some might not believe my death, if it was not a brutal one.”

He must have heard the story twenty times, from his sister’s lips, from the chortling of soldiers around campfires, from a half-grown boy who hurled himself onto Jaime’s sword, vowing vengeance for the Maid of Tarth. Fifteen men, they’d said. Or twenty. Thirty. They had toyed with the Maid, baiting her, driving her to ground with the weight of countless wounds. They had delivered her to death in terror and despair.

She stands before him, tired but alive.

Something must show in his face. Something; because she is stretching out her hand and touching his right elbow, as if she scarcely knows she has moved. “Jaime,” she says, and says no more.

“I grieved for you,” Jaime says, and it is a confession. 

He sees the bob of her throat as she swallows. “I am alive.”

Her hand still rests, forgotten, on his elbow. He takes it in his own hand, and she startles; but she does not pull her hand out of his. 

Holding her gaze, he raises her fingers slowly to his lips. “Do not die again,” he says, a whisper against her skin.

It is not a promise either of them can make, as winter falls over Westeros, as the death toll mounts. Jaime cannot guarantee his own survival to the following dawn, and neither can she. Yet even in the midst of despair, there must be hope; and Jaime’s walked back into his life on this chill morn, in the shape of a giantess from Tarth. 

Her fingers move against his lips, unfurling slightly against his cheek. 

“I will not die again,” she says, and Jaime is content.

***


End file.
